Annual Business Network and Board of Trustees Symposium: Resilience (video)

A resilient system is one that is able to maintain function in the face of disturbance. Confronted with disturbance, a system can either increase its hardness in an attempt to decrease the impact of the disturbance or increase its resilience and, within limits, minimize the impact and recover more quickly. Hardening a system tends to increase brittleness, and may actually contribute to large-scale failures. This understanding has influenced the design of bridges, airplane wings, and even paper clips. However, hardening also occurs in biological, financial and social systems. Our increasing understanding of the response of these systems to stress provides a framework to move beyond earlier qualitative studies of resilience. The November 2012 Business Network and Trustee Symposium will focus on the topic of resilience and its role in ecosystems, financial markets, social systems, and other networks.

Speakers Include:

Keynote Speaker: Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy program at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, and author of "That Used to be US: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back".

Abhas K. Jha, Program Leader for the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific Region's Disaster Risk Management Team

Adam Rose, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

Cowan Legacies Symposium

To honor SFI's founding president, George Cowan, his important scientific legacies and his endowment of the Cowan Professorship at SFI, the three inaugural Cowan Professors will each present a lecture on a topic relating to their current research.